To your point about web services - if you look at that as "what are some cool things I can do with public web services" you may have a point, Google is being pretty innovative. But the real work on web services is happening in Business Component architecture - component to component communication. Both MS and IBM are in a differnt ballpark altogether than Google here. This is a place where IBM is reinventing itself and MS sees an opening to get into the big business game. IBM on J2EE and MS on.NET.